Official lying in the UK: what child detention reveals about how we are governed

Persistent undermining of medical evidence that children are being harmed. Officials misleading ministers over a case of child sex abuse. Clare Sambrook’s evidence to the House of Lords suggests our democracy is in serious trouble.

For almost two years OurKingdom has been exposing the
gap between official rhetoric and practice in the UK government’s appalling
treatment of the vulnerable children of asylum seekers.

Today we present a disturbing
new dossier by OurKingdom Co-Editor, the award-winning author Clare Sambrook
— Official lying and how it harms
our democracy (which can be opened as a PDF).

The dossier arose in response
to an invitation from the House of Lords Communications Committee. The peers invited
Clare to give live evidence on 11th October for their current
inquiry into the future of investigative journalism. This dossier is being submitted
to the committee today as an additional briefing paper.

The peers asked: what are the
threats to journalism? Sambrook answers: the biggest threat to journalism and
our democracy is official lying, and here is a narrow but deep sample of the
way that officials communicate. “If the systematic mendacity recorded here is
representative of the way government functions,” says Sambrook, “then our
democracy is in serious trouble.”

Also giving evidence the same
day was Ian Hislop. He helped the peers understand some basic distinctions, for
example that hacking is not
investigative journalism. He also made a striking point, for me at least, when
asked to define investigative journalism. In part, he answered, it is saying
the same true thing again and again and again and again until the penny drops.
It is not just that Private Eye runs
a story, its influence comes from repeating it over and over again.

There is an important lesson
here. What matters is not revealing something that is wrong. The ice soon closes
over. What matters – and what of course costs time and money – is continuous,
informed, accurate repetition so that exposé of the wrongdoing will not go
away. Hackgate can be seen as a classic vindication of this analysis. It did
not just explode with the Milly Dowler revelation. Had the Guardian, or any
other paper, run that story out of the blue, there would have been shock but no
other consequences, certainly not the closure of the News of the World and the
Leveson Inquiry. Without Nick
Davies’s (who gave evidence alongside Sambrook) utterly dedicated (for years
ignored) persistence and the Guardian’s commitment to him, there would have
been no explosion.

This led me to reflect on the
impact of Clare Sambrook’s coverage of child detention. It was backed by a
campaign: just over two years ago Clare and five friends working unpaid and
unfunded launched End Child Detention
Now. OurKingdom was able to open its doors and let the
campaign publish repeatedly and at will. We didn’t say, “Oh, we have already
‘covered’ that”. And boy did Clare and her ECDN colleagues invest their
time. In the process OurKingdom
learnt how to combine ‘investigative
comment’ with openness. I had not fully understood the importance of
repetition as part of effective exposure.

Just how much work this means
you can see for yourself, in the brief sample of Sambrook articles listed
below. (The entire ECDN press campaign published so far is here). Now
Sambrook’s dossier on official mendacity takes the argument a step further. For
in the intense, relentless process of exposing the scandal of child detention
another perhaps even greater scandal emerges. The British state and its civil
service, which presents itself as an honest public service, is suborned. There
is a clear pattern of persistent
official lying used in defence of the punitive practice of arresting and
detaining asylum-seeking families.

It is very important to
understand that we are not talking about politicians being ‘economical with the
truth’, or being misleading or downright lying — which everyone expects.
It is not a matter of broken promises made on the stump to win votes. Clare
Sambrook exposes repeated and systematic cover-up by officials, by civil servants employed by the taxpayer, of
reputable medical evidence that children were being harmed. In the dossier she
highlights attempts by officials to mislead ministers about the significance of
safeguarding failures in a case of alleged child sex abuse at Yarl’s Wood, the
UK Border Agency’s notorious Bedfordshire detention centre.

Urging a
restoration of respect for information, Sambrook writes: “The role of
government and local government press officers should be to serve the public
with truth, not to serve ministers by spinning to the public.” To achieve this
she suggests that “every press release and public statement issued by officials
should be signed off by an official who takes responsibility for the accuracy
of the information. It should be forbidden for civil servants to mislead
Parliament or its committees, just as ministers are forbidden from so doing.”

The issue could
hardly be more important if there is to be any trust in government.

At one point in
the Committee hearings, committee chairman Lord Inglewood asked Ian Hislop and
Alan Rusbridger: “Do you think there is masses of scandals out there that
just never get revealed at all?” Hislop replied: “There is plenty that nobody
knows anything about. Every time something turns up, I do not know about you, I
say, ‘Good grief, I didn’t know that’.” I felt everyone
in the room was reflecting on their secrets, little and perhaps not so little,
for who knows? Baroness Fookes
chipped in: “Like the perfect murder, we do not know about it.”

Indeed. But how much more
perfect is it for everyone to know that the truth is being murdered while
neither preventing nor reporting it.

A
look back through the OurKingdom archive of Sambrook’s journalism that is
grounded in her work with the pro bono citizens’ campaign End
Child Detention Now:

While in opposition, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg
had called Labour’s policy of arresting and detaining asylum seeking families “state
sponsored cruelty”, and his party made ending child detention a manifesto
promise. The coalition agreement included the unqualified assertion: “We will
end child detention”. But instead of ending detention, the Coalition government
ordered a “review of the alternatives” which excluded the very obvious
alternative of not detaining children. To
run this review it appointed, not a person of proven independence, but the UK
Border Agency’s own Dave Wood, director of criminality and
detention, and a staunch defender of the detention policy who had gone so far
as to undermine peer reviewed medical evidence of harm to children in a
misleading memo to Parliament.

The next day Nick Clegg duly proclaimed: “We are setting out, for the first time, how we
are ending the detention of children for immigration purposes . . . That
practice, the practice we inherited, ends here.”

In July 2011, more than a year after the government promised to
end child detention, we published Sambrook’s Frisk
the 5-year-old: the UK Government’s new compassionate approach to child
detention, revealing how a 5 year old, wrongly listed
as a “visitor” to a UKBA detention facility at a Heathrow Airport detention
facility and thus not recorded as a detainee, was subjected to a “rub down
search” by a custody officer saying, “You’re a big boy now, so I have to search
you.”

Last
week, on 15 November, in the House of Commons Nick Clegg faced this
question from Labour
MP Lisa Nandy:

“Last year, the Deputy Prime Minister, speaking in a professional
capacity, set out how he would end child detention by May. It is now November.
Does he still believe this practice is immoral and does he still plan to keep
his promise? If so, will he tell the House when?”

Mr Clegg replied, “Compared with the previous Government’s record of
thousands of young people being detained—yes, immorally—behind bars when they
were entirely innocent, the new arrangements are a complete, humane, liberal
revolution, of which I am very proud indeed.”

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